Context
Early Socratic (elenchtic, “refutational”) dialogue, ends in aporia (“puzzlement”) on the nature of piety. Takes place before the Apology, but before the Theaetetus and after the Sophist.
Chain of Argument
Mention of Socrates’ daimon and his charge of impiety by Meletus.
Definition: “what is dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious.”
- The gods disagree as to what is dear to them. New definition: “the pious is what all the gods love, and the opposite, what all the gods hate, is the impious.”
Original (polytheistic) Euthyphro dilemma: “Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?”
- There is something loving and something being loved; something affected and something affecting.
- The pious is whatever is loved by the gods. Why do the gods love what they love? “Because it is pious”.
- Then it is being loved because it is pious and not pious because it is being loved
Euthyphro tries arguing the latter, but justifies it with the former, which contradicts it.
Ruling out the case that the pious and the god-loved are the same:
But if the god-loved and the pious were the same, my dear Euthyphro, then if the pious was being loved because it was pious, the god-loved would also be being loved because it was god-loved; and if the god-loved was god-loved because it was being loved by the gods, then the pious would also be pious because it was being loved by the gods.
Euthyphro then becomes confused, Daedalus metaphor introduced (shows up again at the end of the Meno).
New topic: is all that is pious necessarily just?
Where there is piety there is also justice, but where there is justice there is not always piety.
That is, the pious is a subset of the just.
The godly and pious is the part of the just that is concerned with the care of the gods.
- “Care in each case has the same effect; it aims at the good and the benefit of the object cared for.”
- Piety, if it is care of the gods, should aim at the good and benefit of the gods, but it does not make them better.
New definition: piety is not care of the gods, but service to them.
Piety is a knowledge of how to sarcifice and pray, how to give and beg from the gods.
- What are we giving? It does not benefit the gods, but pleases them. So the pious is back to being what is pleasing to the gods.
Commentary
The original Euthyphro dilemma is narrow in scope: it applies to a polytheistic belief system and to piety. The modern Leibnizian Euthyphro dilemma is: is the Good good because God wills it or does God will it because it is good? It applies to monotheism and to the Good because God is the arbiter of the good in most monotheistic religions. If the Good is good because God wills it, then the Good is arbitrary and is not good in virtue of its goodness, but good in virtue of being willed by God. If God wills it because it is good then the Good exists outside of God and he is beholden to it. The former renders goodness arbitrary, the latter restricts the will of God.
The Classical Theist solution to the dilemma is to argue for divine simplicity, that whatever properties God has is what God is. If “God is good” is true, then “God is the Good” is true. Therefore the Good and God are one and the same, and the dilemma is avoided because it is premised on the idea that God and the Good are different.
The Leibnizian Euthyphro dilemma can be abstracted further from God/the Good to God/the truth. Could God have changed mathematical truths, laws of logic, etc? The same thing applies. God does not create truth, he is not beholden to truth, he is truth.
This still restricts God’s will in a certain sense: God cannot act contrary to his nature/essence. Since goodness is God’s essence, equivalent with his existence, God could not have created a different good. Since truth is God’s essence, equivalent to his existence, God could not have created a different world with different truths. If the act of creation was not part of God’s essence from the very beginning, God could have not created the world. But the world exists, so God had no choice but to create the world. The question is then: What is will and what is God’s will? This leads into the debate of theological voluntarism. The most radical anti-voluntarist being Spinoza, who thought that every event that ever occurs is a predetermined event that follows from God’s essence by necessity (necessitarianism). The most radical voluntarist being William of Ockham, a nominalist, who thought that any truth about anything could be changed if God so willed it, and that as a result univerals, qua unchangeable truths, do not exist.
The Leibnizian Euthyphro dilemma takes for granted the willing aspect of God (most monotheistic religions accept that God has a will). The pagan neoplatonists, who believed in a One without will and intellect, had no such dilemma. They had something analogous to divine simplicity but which applied to the One instead of a willing, intelligent God. No issues ever arose for them.
A God with a will produces the Leibnizian Euthyphro dilemma, and the best solution to this dilemma still restrict’s God’s free will in a certain respect. The only thing to do for the Classical Theist is to explain away this restriction by differentiating God’s will and human will through the analogy of being; or, how God’s “will” is different in kind but analogous to human will.
Plato Socrates Theaetetus Sophist The Apology Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Euthyphro Dilemma God Theological Voluntarism Necessitarianism Neoplatonism The One Benedict de Spinoza William of Ockham Classical Theism Piety Daedelus Meno The Good Nominalism